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Defending the Queen

‘Queen Anne,’ by Anne Somerset

Britain’s Queen Anne (who reigned from 1702 to 1714) has not been treated kindly by historians. Consensus has it that “Brandy Nan” was obese and of limited intelligence, with a predilection for the bottle. More dangerously, she is supposed to have put herself under the thumb of domineering women favorites with political agendas: first the Whig partisan Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, and subsequently the duchess’s upstart cousin Abigail Masham, a Tory sympathizer. (It is suggested from the surviving correspondence that Anne might have had lesbian leanings, though whether these were ever acted upon is unknown.) She is seldom given any credit for the great events of her reign, which included the 1707 Act of Union and the glorious victories over the armies of Louis XIV.

Anne Somerset, who has written about Elizabeth I and William IV, among other royals, has now produced a spirited and extremely convincing defense of the hapless Anne. So many of our unflattering ideas about Anne, she points out, have come from the vindictive pen of the Duchess of Marlborough. The fact that the duchess was clever, witty and bitchy meant that her jibes have been remembered and repeated through the generations. What many have failed to take into account is that the beautiful duchess was not only a termagant but was unreliable and demonstrably unbalanced. (Somerset wisely doesn’t go in for posthumous psychoanalyzing, but the duchess’s behavior could be consistent with both clinical mania and paranoia.) Her fall from Anne’s favor was no one’s fault but her own — she had behaved again and again, as Somerset demonstrates, with staggering insolence — nevertheless, her rage knew no bounds when Anne took up with the more pliant Abigail Masham. Yet the veracity of the duchess’s memoirs and correspondence has seldom been questioned, while the Marlboroughs’ image has been expertly burnished for posterity, thanks mainly to their famous descendant Winston Churchill’s multivolume biography of the duke.

Anne had the misfortune to live in ­interesting times. She was born five years after the restoration of her uncle, Charles II; her father, James II, was the heir presumptive and continued to be so, for the libidinous Charles, father of numerous out-of-wedlock offspring, was unable to sire a legitimate child. James, alas, was a Roman Catholic, and at his succession to the throne a country exhausted by a century of religious turbulence, including a revolution and civil war, was unwilling to accept a monarch not of the established religion. James played his cards exceedingly badly, and when he was ousted after only three years, Anne deserted his cause in favor of her elder sister, Mary, and her husband, William of Orange, who became England’s first constitutional monarchs.

As William and Mary continued childless, it became probable that Anne would ascend the throne. She was unpromising monarchical material. For one thing, she wasn’t particularly well educated — even the partisan Somerset doesn’t claim otherwise — and her schooling was “astonishingly inadequate,” considering the possibility she might become queen: She was taught only the most basic arithmetic and very little of the history of her own realm. “There can be no doubt that had Anne been a boy she would have been taught very differently,” Somerset writes, while adding rather astutely that “whether such a training, with its heavy emphasis on classical languages, would have made Anne a better ruler remains conjectural.” Anne was also plagued by ill health. At the time this was attributed to “gout,” a catchall term of the 18th century, but the illness that tormented her might have been lupus, a disease that was crippling before the advent of modern medications.

Yet Anne had a surprising confidence in her ability to govern, one that seems not to have been entirely misplaced. Her love for her country and her wish to do well by it are evident in all that she did and wrote. Her firmness in the Anglican faith and her distaste for all religious dissent might not seem particularly laudable to modern readers, who prize toleration, but in the context of the era it was all-important. England wanted a Protestant monarch, and it wanted religious harmony, insofar as that was possible; Anne provided these. The presence of her Catholic half brother, just across the Channel in France, was a perpetual threat that Anne’s army and navy managed to contain. Far from having no will of her own, as the Duchess of Marlborough claimed, Anne demonstrated a firm one at many moments of crisis, and for someone who clearly disliked confrontation she proved again and again that she could face it when necessary.

Like Queen Victoria a century and a half later, Anne cultivated a maternal image, presenting herself as the mother of her people. Tragically, her career as an actual mother was cut short: None of her children survived to adulthood. Pregnant at least 17 times, she suffered numerous miscarriages and stillbirths. Two little daughters were taken from her by smallpox. Her precocious but sickly son and heir, the Duke of Gloucester, succumbed to a fever at the age of 11.

As the number of pregnancies suggests, Anne enjoyed a happy relationship with her husband, Prince George of Denmark. Mocked as a nonentity by highfliers like the Marlboroughs, George didn’t cut a glamorous figure at court or on the battlefield, but he was a kind and thoughtful man, supportive of his wife and content, so it seemed, with his second-place position. Anne’s marriage was solid, even if she was romantically attracted to other women. When Sarah Churchill, in a crude attempt at blackmail, threatened to make Anne’s early, effusive letters public, Anne was dismayed, begging the duchess to return her “strange scrawls.”

If all this makes Somerset’s biography sound like a racy read in the style of Ophelia Field’s 2003 biography of the Duchess of Marlborough, nothing could be further from the truth. “Queen Anne” is essentially a political biography: British party politics were born in Queen Anne’s lifetime, during the attempt to exclude her Catholic father from the succession, and during her own reign the Whig-Tory rivalry reached a level of malice and vituperation that has perhaps never again been matched. Many pages are devoted to the machinations of players like Robert Harley (later Lord Oxford), Henry St. John (later Lord Bolingbroke) and Sidney Godolphin. The rivalries and ­back-stabbing between the various factions make as unedifying a spectacle as anything to be seen on today’s Senate floor, and may wear down a majority of casual readers. Despite the book’s subtitle, it contains more politics than passion.

The unlikely queen achieved numerous successes in her life, but none, perhaps, was more surprising than her leaving of it. As her health declined rapidly, some court insiders speculated that she had made secret deals with the Jacobites, providing for her half brother to return and claim his lost kingdom. Most observers feared that chaos or revolution would ensue upon her death. Nothing of the kind occurred: The Protestant succession, planned since 1688, went smoothly into gear, and Prince George of Hanover unhurriedly made his way to England to become King George I. Bolingbroke was amazed: “Sure there never was yet so quiet a transition from one government to another.” Despite further Jacobite invasions during the Georgian period, the British succession would never again be in real question. “Free at last of all her pain, care and sorrow,” Somerset concludes, “this most conscientious of rulers had discharged her final duty.”

QUEEN ANNE

The Politics of Passion

By Anne Somerset

Illustrated. 621 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.

Correction: December 22, 2013

A review on Dec. 1 about “Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion,” by Anne Somerset , misstated the successional status of Queen Anne’s father before he became King James II. He was the heir presumptive of Charles II , not the heir apparent. (Generally, in the British system of royal primogeniture, the heir apparent, in contrast to an heir presumptive, is one whose claim to the throne cannot be superseded by the birth of a closer heir.) As the brother of Charles, who had no legitimate offspring, James was heir presumptive, but could have been displaced by the birth of a legitimate child to Charles.

Brooke Allen teaches literature at Bennington College. She is editing the collected letters of Terry Southern.

A version of this review appears in print on December 1, 2013, on page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Always an England. Today's Paper|Subscribe